Down to Earth (36 page)

After making sure he had a round in the chamber of his rifle and the safety off, he hurried up to the gray-whiskered Big Ugly. In Arabic, he said, “You are under arrest. Come with me.”

“What?” The tufts of hair above the Tosevite’s eyes were still black. They leaped upward, a sign of surprise or alarm. “I have done nothing.”

“You will be questioned. If you have done nothing, you will be freed.” Gorppet went back to the language of the Race: “Seize him—and then on to the entranceway.”

Before the Big Ugly could move, the squad of soldiers swarmed over him. Though he was bigger than any of them, together they hustled him toward the guarded entry. A couple of Tosevites who’d been with him shouted and made as if to try to rescue him, but Gorppet and the other males pointed their rifles at them and they fell back.

“What is this?” asked a trooper at the entranceway.

“I think it is Khomeini,” Gorppet answered, which made the other male’s eye turrets jerk in surprise. “We will find out. This building is secure, not so?”

“Considering what it is and where it is, it had better be,” the trooper said. “Everyone in this city wants to destroy it, but it is the most secure building here.”

Gorppet waited to hear no more. “Come on, you,” he said in Arabic, and gestured to the males in his squad to get the Big Ugly moving again. As they hurried him down the covered way toward the shrine, cries of fury rang out among the Tosevites beyond the razor-wire barriers. They made Gorppet begin to hope he really had seized Khomeini. Would the Tosevites have got so excited for anyone less?

The shrine, Gorppet discovered, had an armored door. In spite of that, peace flowed through him when he walked in and saw the tiny holographic images of all the Emperors who had reigned since the unification of Home. The interior
was
Home, or felt like it, and the presence of a few Tosevites didn’t change that.

A male came hurrying up to the squad. “You should not enter this place bearing weapons,” he said, as if to a half-trained hatchling.

“We would not have, superior sir, did I not believe this Big Ugly here to be the agitator named Khomeini,” Gorppet replied.

As it had at the entrance to the perimeter around the shrine, that name worked wonders. Several males came hurrying forward. They took charge of the Tosevite. Very much as an afterthought, one of them added, “You soldiers wait here while we attempt to identify this fellow.”

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Gorppet said. His eye turrets flicked from one Emperor’s image to another. So many Emperors to enfold and cherish his spirit when it finally left his body.

And then the males came back, far more excited than they should have been inside the shrine. “It
is
!” one of them exclaimed. “We were almost certain ourselves, and then one of our Tosevite converts positively identified him for us. It is Khomeini.” Awe of a new and different sort washed over Gorppet. He’d never been a hero before, nor thought he wanted to be. Now he discovered it wasn’t so bad.

Over the weeks since fleeing from Peking, Liu Han had discovered how much she’d forgotten about farming and about farming villages since leaving her own village near Hankow. What she’d forgotten mostly involved two things: how uncomfortable village life was and how much work it involved.

She’d thought she remembered, but she was wrong. Memory had failed to warn her about how exhausted she would be, staggering home from the fields at sunset every evening. Maybe that was because they grew wheat and barley and millet in these northern lands, not the rice that had sprung up in the paddies around her old village. Maybe, but she doubted it. More had to do with memory’s being like opium and blurring how bad things had been. And more still was her being twice as old as she had been back then. Things she could have done easily in those days left her stiff and sore and aching now.

Living in a straw-roofed stone hut didn’t help her recover. She and Liu Mei had more space to themselves than they’d enjoyed back in the Peking rooming houses in which they’d lived, but that was the only advantage she could see. A dirt floor meant everything was filthy all the time. The well was far away. The water that came from it was unpurified, too. It had given her a flux of the bowels, and had given her daughter a nastier one.

But worse than all that was the feeling of emptiness, of disconnectedness, she had. Ever since she’d come to Peking, she’d been at the center of the revolutionary struggle against the imperialist scaly devils. News from all over the city, from all over China, from all over the world, had flowed in to her. Now she heard nothing but village gossip. One other thing her memory had failed to hold was how boring and picayune village gossip was.

To her annoyance, Nieh Ho-T’ing seemed to drop into the narrow world of the village as if he’d never seen Peking a day in his life. He was older than she, and came from a wealthier family than she did. But he fit right in, and she didn’t.

He laughed at her when she complained. “You have lived among the bourgeoisie too long,” he said. “A little reeducation will do you good.”

“Oh, yes, it will be splendid—if I live through it,” Liu Han answered. “I don’t want my bones to end up here, where nobody knows or cares who I am. And I certainly don’t want Liu Mei to have to stay here for the rest of her life to tend to my grave. She would be buried here even more than I was.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Nieh said. “When things calm down, we’ll be moving on. We’ll get in touch with the others who got out of Peking, too, and with the ones who weren’t in Peking at all, and we’ll start up the struggle again. We don’t need to hurry. The dialectic is certain.”

“The dialectic is certain,” Liu Han repeated. She believed that, as she’d believed in the endless gods and spirits of the countryside back when she was nothing but a peasant. But the gods and spirits of the countryside had failed against both the Japanese and the little scaly devils, and the dialectic, however much she believed in it, did not seem to be holding its own against the little devils. She said what was in her heart: “Losing Peking hurt.”

“Of course it did,” Nieh said. “The People’s Liberation Army has been hurt before, though, and worse than this. Chiang and the Kuomintang reactionaries thought they’d destroyed us a generation ago, but we made the Long March and kept fighting. And we will keep fighting here, too, till we win, however long it takes.”

“However long it takes.” Liu Han repeated that, too. She saw time stretching out as a river before her, a river longer than the Yangtze. Where along that river lay the port named Red Victory? Was there such a port at all, or did the river of time just flow into the sea called Forever? She wondered if she’d live long enough to find out.

She didn’t share the conceit with Nieh Ho-T’ing. He might accuse her of trying to set up as a poet. That she could deal with. But he might also accuse her of defeatism, an altogether more serious business.

Next morning, just before sunrise, a motorcar rolled into the village. Music, both Chinese-style and the raucous noise the little scaly devils enjoyed, blared from the speakers mounted on top of the car. A man’s voice—a recording, Liu Han realized after a moment—called out, “Come see how much we are all alike, little scaly devils and human beings! Come see! Come see!”

“This is a new sort of propaganda,” Liu Mei observed, spooning up the last of her barley porridge.

“So it is.” Liu Han sipped tea, then sighed. “I suppose we’d better go find out what kind of new propaganda it is.”

She set down her cup and stepped out of the hut where she’d been living. Liu Mei followed. The motorcar, Liu Han saw, was of the scaly devils’ manufacture, and was of a make she knew to be armored. It carried several little devils with body armor and rifles, and one who came out unarmed.

“I greet you, people of this village,” that one said, speaking Chinese as well as Liu Han had ever heard a little scaly devil do. “For too long, your kind and mine have been enemies. Part of the reason we have fought, I think, is that we have believed we are more different than is so.”

“A very new sort of propaganda,” Liu Mei murmured. Liu Han nodded. The scaly devil reminded her of the fast-talking merchants of Peking, who all did their best to sell people things they neither wanted nor needed. But what was this little devil selling?

He didn’t leave her in suspense for long. “You Chinese people reverence your ancestors,” he said. “Is it not so?” Here and there in the crowd that had gathered around the motorcar, people nodded. Liu Han found herself nodding, too, and made herself stop with a grimace of annoyance. If only she hadn’t been talking with Nieh Ho-T’ing the day before. The scaly devil went on, “We, too, give reverence to the spirits of our Emperors, our Emperors dead. Their spirits comfort us when we die. They can comfort your spirits when you die, if only you will also give them reverence while you are still living.”

Having thought of Nieh, Liu Han looked around for him. There he was, looking like a peasant who was starting to get old. She caught his eyes. One of his eyebrows rose a little. She’d known him a long time, and understood what that meant—he was taking seriously what the scaly devil said.

“We have big shrines in big cities,” the little devil went on. “But in a village like this, we do not need a big shrine. A small one will do. We have one here.” He gestured to the armed scaly devils. Two of them opened the motorcar’s boot and took out what looked like a large, polished-metal headstone for a Christian grave. The little devil who spoke Chinese said, “Where is the village headman?”

No one said anything. No one came forward. Liu Han took that as a good sign. Had the village headman admitted who he was, his next step at collaboration might have been to tell the scaly devil Communists were hiding there.

“I mean no harm to anybody,” the scaly devil said. When silence stretched, he continued, “Somebody, anybody, then, please tell me, where can we plant this shrine in the ground in the village without angering anyone? We do not wish to cause anger. Our spirits and yours should be together.”

Liu Han had never heard language like that from a little scaly devil. It was good propaganda, very good propaganda. If they’d used propaganda like that from the moment they came to Earth, many more people would have been reconciled to their rule. She stared around the crowd with worry in her eyes.

To her vast relief, people still stood silent. The little devil who spoke Chinese gave a very humanlike shrug. He said, “All right, then, if you do not tell me, we will place it here, near the edge of this little square. As I say, we do not mean to anger anyone. I will also tell you one other thing. We will know how you treat this shrine. We will know if you offer to it. You do not have to do that, but we wish you would. We will know if you harm it, too. If you do that, we will come back and punish you. You need to understand that.”

He turned an eye turret to the males holding the shrine and spoke in his own language. A couple of the males took the shrine over to one edge of the square, where it would be visible but would not get in the way. The one who spoke Chinese had chosen well. The other two planted the shrine in the ground. Then all the little scaly devils got back into the armored motorcar and drove away.

As soon as they were gone, villagers crowded around Liu Han, Liu Mei, and Nieh Ho-T’ing. “You come from the city,” a woman said to Liu Han. “Can it be true, what the ugly scaly devil told us? If we take down that piece of polished metal and smash it, will the little devils know?”

“I don’t know if they will, but they might,” Liu Han admitted reluctantly. “They are very good at making tiny machines that tell them all sorts of things.”

A man asked, “Are they putting up one of these shrines in every village?”

“How can I know that? Am I in every village?” Liu Han knew she sounded irritable, but she couldn’t help it. Yes, she felt cut off from the world, here in a village without even a wireless set or a telegraph line. And she was worried. If the scaly devils had put up a shrine in one no-account village, they were surely putting up shrines in a lot of them if not in all.

Another man said, “The scaly devils are strong. Their ancestors must be strong, too. How can it hurt if we burn paper goods in front of their shrine, the way we do for our own ancestors? Maybe the spirits of the little devils will like us if we do that. Maybe they will help us if we do that.”

“You will be doing what the little devils want if you make offerings to the spirits of their dead,” Liu Han said. Listening, she heard her daughter and Nieh Ho-T’ing saying the same thing, saying it ever louder and more stridently.

But the villagers didn’t listen. “If we do this, the little devils are more likely to leave us alone,” one of them said. Before long—even before people went out to the fields—automobiles and big houses and liquor bottles and other offerings, all made of paper, went up in smoke before the metal shrine.

Sick with defeat, Liu Han went out to grub away weeds in the millet fields around the village. She tore them from the ground with savage ferocity. Her ancestors got no offerings, but the dead Emperors did. Where was the justice in that?

And if the villagers made offerings to the dead Emperors, wouldn’t that lead them toward accepting the little scaly devils as their rightful rulers? The scaly devils had to think so, or they wouldn’t have come out with all these shrines. They had a long history of oppressing and co-opting people—or rather, other kinds of devils—they’d beaten in war. Liu Han knew that.

The dialectic said the little devils were doomed: progressive forces would overwhelm them. “But when?” Liu Han asked the millet waving gently in the breeze. “When?” She got no answer. The millet would be there regardless of whether people or little scaly devils ruled the land. Cursing, Liu Han got back to work.

These days, the Russies had to pay only a pound to admit the whole family into services on a Friday night or Saturday morning. “See, it is cheaper now,” said one of the Lizards collecting the fee at the door. “Nothing to get upset about.”